The Adventures of Lilli: Valentines Weekend 2010

Remember last Valentines Day? Yeah, thankfully she's gotten bigger and I've gotten a lot smaller! (She was 21 days old.)

This year we had a much different Valentines! Wednesday night I baked a ton of Valentines cookies for Lilli's classmates, and Thursday night we all helped decorate them. Of course Lilli helped with the sprinkles on some of them.

She looooves to help in the kitchen. Shaking the sprinkle can is her favorite (well, eating the cookies is really her favorite.)

Pippin helped by using his body to catch the powdered sugar as I made icing. You can always count on our little spotted snow leopard to make sure the kitchen floor is clean!

The final product - beautiful cookies! We made plain ones for her classmates to enjoy with their lunch, and iced ones for the teachers. We sent a tray to each room she's been in so far - Infant 1, Infant 2 and now Toddler 1! By the time she's in the Pre-K room we are going to be sending a LOT of cookies!

And of course we sent Valentines to all her classmates, along with a little coloring book for each of them.

Her teachers were really excited about their cookies and Valentines! Unfortunately, Lilli really didn't want to cooperate and have her picture made with Ms Barbara!

However, being sweet and bringing her teacher something scored Lilli an EARLY morning snack. As Brent was swinging back by after delivering cookies he "caught" her enjoying her morning snack, a LOT early! She even has that "you caught me" look.....

Last year we took Lilli to her first restaurant outing as part of our Valentines date. This year we took her to Parents Night Out at church and went on a date for TWO! For $3 in babysitting that's a deal you can't pass up! PNO was from 5-10, we dropped her off around 5:30 to make our 6 pm reservation. She was the youngest kiddo there, which I totally don't get - when are you ever going to get a babysitter for $3?? And she got TONS of special attention from some friends in our Sunday School class.

For our date we went to Allium. It's a restaurant in our neighborhood that we hadn't had a chance to try yet, and a few weeks ago they ran a special on Groupon where you got a $50 gift certificate for $25. It was pretty good, but I doubt we'll go back. They were PACKED, and their service was super slow (even later when the place had pretty much cleared out.) We started out with the housemade chips with mustard sauce - yum!)

I got a cocoa chili grouper with pepper-jack cheese grits. The grouper had no taste on its own, which is nuts considering how good "cocoa chili" should taste! The grits were awesome. Brent had a spinach lasagna, which was also just ok.

And for dessert we had the red velvet cheesecake. SUPER rich and we were SO stuffed. We needed 3 or 4 more people to split that with! It was really good & something totally different. All in all it was a pretty good place, and their prices really weren't bad for a nice restaurant. But it still isn't a favorite with us, which is probably why we wouldn't go back again.

Our server was so slow it was about 7:40 by the time we were done, so we really couldn't do anything afterwards since Lilli usually starts to get fussy around 8 for bedtime. When we picked her up she had a little goodie bag of things they had colored and some other Valentines toys. She had a great time!

This morning Lilli wore the Valentines dress her Grandma Carden made for her. I like this artsy pic of her in the dress (and yes, that's cheese in the floor, my helper was helping with the groceries.)

Here she is, totally surprised that Valentines snuck up on her! The sleeves and arms were a little big, but the length was good.

And this is what happened if you tried to take away her milk for a better picture! She was hungry for lunch, Sunday mornings are a frantic race against naps and eating!